Looking for Alice ...... 250,000 Bexley records now online and that postcard from Chislehurst

Now I would love to track Alice who sent this postcard of Sidcup Road on December 23 1915.

But while I have the name and the address of the person she sent it to, Alice will always evade me.

If only she had added her surname and then I might have been lucky and found her on the census return for the area and now also from one of the more than 250,000 parish records for the London Borough of Bexley.

Until now they were available from the Bexley Local Studies and Archive Centre* but have been digitalised and can be accessed at Ancestry** and cover local baptisms, marriages and burial from1558 to 1985.

And along side these Ancestry has also released a set of Bexley civil cemetery records which include casualties of the Slade Green Munitions Factory disaster, which killed 11 female workers and a foreman in 1924.

Described by newspapers as a "‘tragedy that rocked the nation’, a memorial for those killed in the fire still remains at Erith Cemetery today" details of which have just been released by Who Do You Think You Are? ***

So for anyone in Eltham with an interest in Bexley there may well be a cornucopia of research opportunities.

Of course not everyone will subscribe to Ancestry but the  Bexley Local Studies and Archive Centre is just a short trip away on Townley Road, Bexleyheath.*

And like all good studiy centres there is a huge collection of things to look at ranging from Electoral registers and poll books which start in 1833 to Kent local directories, rate books, Ordnance Survey maps from the 1860s and  school records, including admission registers.

And if you want more there are local newspapers dating from 1874, local council plans and photographic collections.

But if like me you live along way north of Watford Gap it will have to be Ancestry which offers up a route to Bexley’s past.

Sadly even here I will not be able to discover any more about Alice and as yet the person she sent the card to in Hereford is equally unwilling to come out of the shadows.

So I shall have to content myself with that card which I have written about in the past and which gives us a nice insight into how commercial picture postcards worked.

It is a pretty scene taken in high summer and was originally released in 1905 but with that eye to a profit the postcard company re released it in the December of 1915 with the addition of a Christmas message printed across the front.

Picture; Sidcup Road, 1915 from the series Chislehurst, marketed by Tuck and Sons, courtesy of Tuck DB, https://tuckdb.org/

* Bexley Local Studies and Archive Centre, Central Library, Townley Road, Bexleyheath, DA6 7HJ

**Ancestry,

*** Centuries of Bexley parish records added to Ancestry, jonbauckham, 26 March 2015, Who Do You Think You Are?

**** That mysterious cottage in Chislehurst,